vincit omnia veritas

Around 2003, I published a small site sharing short views of culture, technology, and society by minds who were all smarter than me. The site had a short life, but the persistently curious observer in me, now much older but just as hungry, wants to revive it and continue sharing.

“I go to see every day a few websites and websites to read posts, however this blog gives quality based articles…”

“I’ve been surfing online more than 2 hours today, yet I never found any interesting article like yours. It is pretty worth enough for me. In my opinion, if all website owners and bloggers made good content as you did, the web will be a lot more useful than ever before…”

“This paragraph presents clear idea for the new viewers of blogging, that really how to do running a blog…”

“Excellent posts. I will be dealing with some of these issues as well…”

Achieving our goals matters ofcourse, with a new year in 2018. But we should meditate, too, on the value of the process. How to navigate through Schopenhauer’s valley of unsatisfied desires and goals in midlife … more >>

What Philip K. Dick captured with genius was the ontological unease of a future world in which the human and the abhuman, the real and the fake, blur together. We might actually be living in that type of future now… more >>

“We cannot stay still,” famed “Beginner’s Mind” philosopher Shunryu Suzuki cautions. “We have to do something … but be very observant, careful, and alert. Zen is not some kind of excitement but concentration on our usual everyday routine…” more >>

“Deliberate practice,” Anders Ericcson once observed, “is an effortful activity to help push yourself beyond your comfort zone, otherwise you can never improve.” In areas like Digital, the same concept applies – deliberately experimenting, applying Ericcson’s concepts, can substantially improve product, as it has done for Amazon and Facebook … more >>

” I did 20 minutes in the morning, 20 minutes at night. Within 3 or 4 weeks, I got to the point where I could disconnect, rejuvenate my mind. I also learned how to focus more and calm down – saw the effect right away. I had become much more calm about all my challenges. There are many ways of meditation, and I benefit from all of them.”

“The way that the mind works, very frequently, is that we start from a decision, or a belief, and then the stories that explain it come to our mind. And the sequence that we have when we think about thinking, that arguments come first and conclusions come later, that sequence is often reversed.

“The future Blockchain man will be not be unlike today’s performers in Hollywoodfree agent land, exposed to a broader calculus of career decisions and tradeoffs, unlike the Organization Man who grew up with the expectation of getting a job and working for the corporation” … more from Taylor Pearson at Ribbon Farm >>

“Indeed, to the extent [that Whole Foods’] Mackey has compared Amazon to Waterloo is a valid analogy, Amazon is much more akin to the British Empire, and there is now one less obstacle to sitting astride all aspects of the economy.”

“Obsoletion – where a cheaper, single-purpose product is replaced by a more expensive, general purpose product – is just as common as ‘disruption’ – even more so, in fact. Why the Mac (and PC), iPod, and iPhone weren’t so much disruptive as they were obsoletive.”

“Pop-up philosophy is often more of an occasion for selfie-snapping than self-reflection. How to find the time to stop, sit down and think.” more >>

–André Spicer, professor of organisational behaviour at the Cass Business School at City, University of London, author of The Stupidity Paradox: The Power and Pitfalls of Functional Stupidity at Work (2016). You can get the book on Amazon.

Is it normal to feel more spiritual as one ages? Hindus mark out four stages in life: brahmacari (student), grihastha (householder), vanaprashtha (forest-dweller), sannyasi (renounced one). This structure reminds me that perhaps the elderly are drawn to spiritual questions not because they are caught up in beliefs of rewards or punishments in the afterlife or because they fear death. Rather it may be because the time finally feels right to satisfy inchoate yearnings for any kind of answer to those questions.

“What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.” Harvard political scientist Graham Allison says the Thucydides Trap can occur when a ruling power, feeling threatened by an assertive rising power, often resorts to war. Mr. Graham argues nations like the U.S. can apply lessons from history, apply mutual deterrence strategies, to deal with today’s emerging powers like China … more >>

“A good founder is capable of anticipating which turns lead to treasure and which lead to certain death. A bad founder is just running to the entrance of (say) the “movies/music/filesharing/P2P” maze or the “photosharing” maze without any sense for the history of the industry, the players in the maze, the casualties of the past, and the technologies that are likely to move walls and change assumptions.” more >>

Self-talk can help us learn and think better. When we’re engaged in a conversation with ourselves, we typically ask ourselves questions along the lines of: “How will I know what I know? What do I find confusing? Do I really know this?” Whether we hit the pause button while listening to a podcast or stop to reflect while reading a manual, we develop skills more effectively by thinking about our thinking… more >>

“It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e. the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang onto.”

–Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and a prolific reader of books, once reading two per day in various disciplines when he was younger… more >>

“When I talk to researchers, when I talk to people wanting to engage in entrepreneurship, I tell them that if you read research papers consistently, if you seriously study half a dozen papers a week and you do that for two years, after those two years you will have learned a lot. This is a fantastic investment in your own long term development.”

“Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed (successfully or unsuccessfully) before. It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.”

“Courage, President Kennedy knew, requires something more than just the absence of fear. Any fool can be fearless. Courage, true courage, derives from that sense of who we are … and the belief that we can dig deep and do hard things for the enduring benefit of others.”

– Barack Obama, in a speech on May 7th while accepting the 2017 Centennial “Profiles in Courage” JFK Award… more >>

“I divide my officers into four groups: clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. [Among the four groups] anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions.”

“Being immersed in the commercial world constrains the mind, limiting it to conventional, acceptable thought; it is hard to close a sale if we pause in the proceedings to meditate at length about a man’s relation to the cosmos.”

-Daniel Klein, “Travels with Epicurus” – on aging well and gracefully with purpose, through the ruminations of an old man dawdling through the timeless philosophy of the wise. You can get the book on Amazon.

“Intelligence analysts should be self-conscious about their reasoning processes. They should think about how they make judgments and reach conclusions, not just about the judgments and conclusions themselves…”

Like these two brothers and many visitors to the Plum Village, I came, in 2016, with no expectations and no prior knowledge of the place, the people, or its practice. I did come armed with questions and brought a couple of books by Thich Nhat Hanh, renowned Zen master and Buddhist. After a month practicing silent meditation, I came away transformed … more >>

Charles Dickens, Henri Poincaré, Ingmar Bergman and Charles Darwin working in disparate fields in different times, all shared a high passion, ambition and capacity to focus, yet only worked a few hours a day. How did they manage to be so accomplished? more >>

Napoleon Bonaparte was said to have studied all the great wars before his time, those of Hannibal, Alexander the Great and others, so completely and intently that he was able to intuit coup d’oeil – the right strategy at the right opportunity – to earn his many victories in the battlefield. more >>

“Any type of change is hard, but institutional change – with the need to overcome tradition and bureaucracy – is the most difficult.” How father of modern oceanography Matthew Fontaine Maury mastered geographical, wind and sea data, and transformed maritime exploration… more >>

“You’ll have to work twice as hard to get half as much. So get busy,” says a mom to a 10 year-old Marty Chavez after complaining that he was the only Hispanic kid in a private school in New Mexico. Chavez is now Goldman Sach’s incoming CFO after years at the firm and as a serial tech entrepreneur… more >>

“The deep learning and AI sector have heated up in labor markets to relatively unprecedented levels. Large companies are recently paying $6–10 million per engineer for talent acquisitions, and $4–5M per head for pre-product startups still in academia …” more >>

“Our family lives in over-scheduled [team-sports] suburbia. Sometimes it feels downright dystopian. If you live in the suburbs [in the US], participation in team sports seems to be all the social activity on offer…” more >>

“The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality. But the law is also a memory; the law records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience.”

Azeem Azhar talks with Professor Jeff Zachs, an authority on economic development and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Good conversation covering a wide range of topics: AI, wealth inequality, automation and ethics by Aristotle, who is one of my favorite philosophers. Soundcloud link (46 minutes)

“Look, my job is essentially just corralling more and more facts and information, and occasionally seeing whether that leads to some action. And Charlie [Munger] — his children call him a book with legs.”

Taylor’s Gift is a story of hope and courage in the face of tragedy. My dearest sister, who knows I love reading, gave it to me as a holiday gift to console me over the recent losses of our brother and our beloved dog. Thirteen-year old Taylor Storch lost her life in a skiing accident and the book tells the harrowing journey her surviving parents and family went afterwards. Taylor’s foundation now functions to preserve her legacy. You can get the book on Amazon.

The art of any deal is really the art of its next deal. “When we fail to consider the future consequences of mistreating our counter-parties in a current ‘deal’ or first phase, it can wind up leaving our “reputational cue ball” ill-positioned for the next shot—the next deal or phase to come down the pike.”

Caterina Fake writes about literature, poetry, social justice and the arts on her site at caterina.net. I’ve been following her work and writings since 2000, around the time she launched her site and years before she became more well-known for founding Flickr (acquired by Yahoo), and Hunch (acquired and shut down by eBay). Over 118 thousand followers on Twitter and a Fast Company’s Fast 50 awardee.

Azeem Azhar covers Exponential View and gives a weekly “tour” of how technology is changing business models, society, politics and the economy. I make room in my schedule once a week to at least listen to and reflect on his podcasts on Soundcloud. He has over 15,000 subscribers and 17,000 followers on Twitter.

Perhaps Nouriel “Dr. Doom” Roubini does not deserve his nom de guerre, but he correctly predicted many of the events in the last Great Recession in 2008. I am one of his over 425,000 followers on Twitter and a subscriber to his Economonitor site.

“My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy…the battles between incumbents and software-powered insurgents will be epic. Joseph Schumpeter, the economist who coined the term ‘creative destruction,’ would be proud.”

Albert Meige on why in 2033,you will be “transferring,” i.e. selling your services to the highest bidder, unless you’re among the unlucky 90% who will not possess the right skills or education to be working. Mr. Meige runs Presans, an “open innovation” crowdsourced platform linking 5 million industry experts in business and strategy. 18-minute video.

Wikistrat crowdsourced consulting’s analytic community of over 2,200 diverse and interdisciplinary subject matter experts on geopolitics, strategy and economics is the future of management consulting. Its roster of over 500 PhDs and 125 former military officers, and simulation-driven methodology offer a compelling alternative to McKinsey or Deloitte.

Daniel Kahneman’s book on Thinking Fast and Slow is a very readable, non-technical purview of our mind’s often systematic thinking errors and how they are mainly due to “errors in the machinery of cognition (ie. biases, heuristics) rather than to the corruption of thought by emotion.” Terrific book on understanding your own mental systems, as well as a “must-read” at the CIA. You can get it on Amazon.

“Reading is still the main way that I both learn new things and test my understanding. Each book opens up new avenues of knowledge to explore.”

–Bill Gates’ list of books is on my virtual book shelf. He reads up to 50 books per year. I am often either consuming or planning to read one of the books he has read and recommends. Mr. Gates, founder of Microsoft, the Gates Foundation has over 30 million followers on Twitter and is perennially on the Forbes list of billionaires.

James Clear writes about “behavioral psychology, habit formation, and performance improvement.” I’m one of over 350,000 subscribers to his weekly newsletter and consumer of his simple but good content on mental systems. His article on four burners theory is a favorite of mine.

Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings ,”a subjective lens on what matters in the world and why,” is my go-to resource for meditations on design, philosophy, and psychology. Ms. Popova was a Forbes 30 under 30 honoree and in Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative in Business list.

Benedict Evans atAndreessen Horowitz is my main resource for “what’s going on and what will happen next” in artificial intelligence, mobile and technology. He has over 70,000 subscribers and 190,000 followers on Twitter.

Shane Parrish’s Farnam Street blog is my go-to resource for “making better decisions, creating new ideas, and avoiding stupid errors.” One of my aims in the years ahead is to rebuild my own mental latticework of models. Parrish has over 500,000 subscribers and is a big fan of Buffett and Munger as I am.